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If you've been following this blog, then you'll know I'm a fan of old games. And any retro gamer worth his salt can hardly afford to gloss over one of the all-time greats: the Nintendo Family Computer, otherwise known as the Nintendo Entertainment System.

My Dad bought us an NES in one visit to the US way back when. This one had the light gun and the robot. T'was a tad expensive, around $400 at that time (but then again, the exchange rates were a bit more favorable.) A couple of months down the road, the Family Computer also appeared in the Philippines. Same games, but of course the NES had a nicer design.

Anyway, I got to thinking about these old games when I was flipping through my old comic book collection, dating back to the 1980s. You would not believe the number of ads for video games back then. The games weren't as slick as what we have nowadays, and so the artwork made up for the deficiencies.

This little trip down memory lane left me with an itch for the old Nintendo games. And the solution: FCEU, the Family Computer Emulator Ultra.

FCEU, available from the repositories, looks a little basic but is actually quite a powerful package. It has several video modes, effects, multiple save states, and supports gamepad controllers (the only way to play, really.)

At the most basic, you just run the following command on the terminal:

fceu game.nes

and this will bring up the game.

However, before you do that, you might consider running it through some basic configuration for your controller.

fceu -inputcfg gamepad1

This will bring up a quick command-line dialogue prompting you to press the keys on the controller for the different buttons. FCEU remembers these settings in future runs so you don't need to run this every time.

If you want to run the game full screen,

fceu -fs 1 game.nes

Subsequent runs will remember this setting and run all games in full screen.

As to where to get the games? Dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum.... (I have an original copy of Nintendo Tennis, so technically I'm safe, right?)